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Skiing the Spanish Pyrenees

Bonaigua is one of three sections of the Baqueira/Beret ski resort, in the Val d'Aran in the Pyrenees in northeastern Spain.Credit
James Rajotte for The New York Times

NOTHING made sense.

It was 9:30 on a Sunday morning in the heart of ski season, yet not a single person waited at the ticket booth to buy a lift pass. The rental shop might as well have had a cartoon tumbleweed blowing through it. Outside, nobody was queued up to ride the gondola.

When we reached the mountaintop, our disorientation only deepened. A spoked Mediterranean sun shone overhead, but in every direction big, white, Switzerland-worthy mountains were stapled to the Windex-blue sky.

Where were we?

The answer: deep in the Pyrenees Mountains in Spain, a land of ragged beauty and surprisingly great skiing, a land where no self-respecting, night-loving Spaniard, we soon learned, climbs out of bed to make turns before 10 a.m.

Spain has a reputation, or should we say a few reputations — Pamplona and paella; beaches and bullfights. Most travelers don’t think of lugging their K2s here.

“ ‘The Pyrenees — is there skiing there?’ It’s like a stuck record for us,” said Dave Slattery of Baqueira British Ski School, which caters to English-speaking skiers who venture to the resort of Baqueira/Beret in the northwesternmost corner of Catalonia.

When I heard that Baqueira/Beret is Spain’s lower-key answer to Aspen, I was intrigued. When I heard that the Spanish here really know how to do skiing right — which is to say, they work the Spanish habit of great eating into almost every hour of their day — I booked a ticket.

The disorientation began almost immediately. Maybe it was the fact that I was flying into Barcelona with ski boots. Maybe it was the bright Spanish “Buenas!” that the lifties greeted me with the next morning.

HIGH on the mountain, my friend Tim and I took in the almost surreal surroundings. Though lower in elevation, the Pyrenees in winter do a decent imitation of the Alps. Frozen whitecaps of granite peaks surrounded us. Due south lay the high country of Aigüestortes i Estany De Sant Maurici National Park, dotted with icy lakes. In the distance, Aneto, at 11,168 feet the highest peak in the Pyrenees, scratched the horizon, a shrunken glacier hunkered on its shoulder. Wait — glaciers in Spain? Our disorientation was complete. We decided to just give in and savor the dizziness.

I’d been told the valley the ski resort inhabits, the Val d’Aran, is nearly as much an attraction as the skiing. Now it was spread out below us, 25 miles long, with the ski resort at one end, France at the other end and several villages anchored by 12th-century churches sprinkled in between. Distanced from the rest of Spain by the mountains and by winter snows (a road connecting the valley to the rest of Catalonia was built only in 1924), the region is in some ways nearly as French as it is Spanish, with duck and foie gras on local menus. But the valley is also very much its own place; those same menus feature Aranese dishes like olha Aranesa (a sort of hearty chicken noodle soup, spiked with a large pork meatball and blood sausage). And the menus are frequently written first in Aranese, a language that remains so vibrant here that a ski patroller’s radio is likely to crackle with it alongside Catalan and Spanish. Even the architecture here is distinct: thick-walled stone homes with steep slate roofs built to brave the long Pyrenean winters.

The geography of this place sets it apart as well. Unlike most other Spanish valleys in the Pyrenees, the Val d’Aran faces the Atlantic, catching more storms and thus tending to have more reliable snow. Or at least that’s the theory. While this winter the place is blanketed by snow, during my visit last January Baqueira/Beret, like much of the Alps, was in the midst of a snow drought. Luckily the resort has extensive artificial snow coverage and the best grooming I’ve seen in Europe. Sticking to these manicured slopes, we headed out to see the place.

Baqueira/Beret is the largest ski area in Spain and it is indeed big. Some 4,700 acres — around 1,000 acres larger than Big Sky, Mont. — sprawl over six peaks and ridges that are served by 33 lifts. The place isn’t just wide, it’s also tall, with a vertical drop to match Vail, Colo. When all the terrain is open, there are weeks of exploration to be done here. No wonder Spain’s royal family likes to ski here.

Geography divides the resort into three distinct base areas. We headed north first. Beret is the resort’s most family-friendly sector, with beginner and intermediate runs spilling off the 8,255-foot Tuc deth Dossau peak. With the runs broad and firm and fast under the fine grooming, we opened the throttle and smoked down them on our giant-slalom skis, grateful that everyone else had slept late and left the pistes open for us. Beret doesn’t keep the advanced skier entertained for long, however, so we eventually made our way southward to the heart of the resort, Baqueira. (Baqueira is also the name of the central base village.) Here, lingering intermediate runs and a few expert runs stripe the mountain’s broad, nearly treeless face.

Skiing here reminded Tim and me of the best aspects of skiing in the States: Runs like Mirador and Guineau had a consistent pitch and expert coiffing that was touched up nightly. “It’s like a slightly mellower Sun Valley,” said Tim, as we headed up for another thigh-burning bombing run back down.

Then lunch happened. I’d been warned about the Spanish ski lunch. Spanish skiers don’t wolf down a lukewarm burger and a Coke and run back out to the slopes. They dine late. They drink wine. They savor. A ski bum at heart, I wasn’t sure I could switch gears when, at the late hour of 1:30 we sat down at Restaurant 1,800, one of the resort’s on-mountain restaurants. The waitress set down a platillo of olives marinated in pimento chiles and oil. She popped the cork on a small bottle of crianza. She brought bowls of steaming olha Aranesa. And suddenly I understood. I was content to sit for hours. Which we did, finally staggering, stuffed, to the slopes in time to spin a few last, languid laps.

THE central problem of skiing in Spain began to materialize: How do you do it all? How do you enjoy life the way the Spaniards do and still ski like an American? The previous night we’d gone for an exceptional meal at Casa Irene in the village of Arties at 8 four courses accompanied by a 2005 Rioja. It ended with a homemade walnut liqueur from the valley. I thought our dinner hour was respectable, but a valley acquaintance chuckled afterward and called it “the foreigners’ hour.” Only as we paid and left did the dining room fill with the babble of French and Catalan.

I was determined to go native, at least a little bit. That next afternoon, after our large meal on the mountain, we returned from skiing at day’s end and did as the locals recommended: We headed back to our hotel for a siesta.

Lodgings are scattered all along the valley floor, a car ride away from the lifts, but we’d wisely chosen to stay at the resort’s base at the Hotel Val de Ruda. A 35-room, four-star hotel and spa built by a former ski instructor in the style of an Aranese country manor, the Val de Ruda has a slate roof, thick stone walls outside and hand-hewn wood beams inside. Guests read the day’s copy of La Vanguardia by a sizzling fire. It was acogedor, Spain’s answer to Swiss Gemütlichkeit, or coziness. Sleep came easy.

That evening, though scarcely hungry, we headed four miles down from our hotel in Baqueira to the village of Arties. The Val d’Aran is awash with great places to eat — there are some 180 of them in a valley of about 7,000 permanent residents — and little Arties, with its handsome, twisty streets, is the culinary center. The bar at Tauèrnes Urtau was jammed with a staggering 40 plates of tapas and pinchos like fried quail eggs and chorizo on toast. We grazed, washing them down with purple glasses of tinto.

Photo

Baqueira/Beret resort, in the Pyrenees.Credit
James Rajotte for The New York Times

A compromise: We drove four more miles down to Vielha, the valley’s main town, a less charming burg of ski stores and bars. There we stopped in at Bar Era Plaça on the town square and ordered a bottle of the house wine and an assortment of tapas. The bar was a tiled, bright, charmless room. That didn’t matter. To sit before a plate of ruby-red jamón and coins of black blood sausage, and cheer with the locals as Villareal played Real Sociedad on television, felt just about right after a day of skiing in Spain — it was, as they say, tranquilo.

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After Spanish royalty, Baqueira/Beret is perhaps best known for its off-piste skiing. The next morning, anxious to experience the goods, we hijacked a ski patroller, Nacho Agujetas. We told him we wanted to ski Escornacrabes, the resort’s marquee run, whose name in Aranese means “where goats fall.” Escornacrabes, we’d heard, is less a ski run than an experience: a gun barrel of a gully with stone walls rising on either side that cascades off the Cap de Baqueira and into an adjoining valley.

But Nacho, a charismatic Catalan with a turquoise stud in his ear, shook his head; Escornacrabes was cerrado, closed. “Usually you can ski anywhere,” he said, waving his ski pole toward a slope of grass beneath us as we rode the chairlift. “This year there is no snow.” ( You’ll have better luck this winter; Escornacrabes is open.)

During our visit we could only look hungrily at the resort’s off-piste opportunities. There was a lot to survey: With its generally mellower, forgiving bowls that funnel skiers back to the chairlifts, Baqueira/Beret offers entire yawning valleys to adventurous intermediates who are just getting comfortable leaving the ski runs. Experts won’t be bored, either — when there’s snow, that is. In addition to Escornacrabes, several ridges crimp the resort’s face like a rumpled bedspread, each of them striped with short but steep scare-your-mother chutes.

With the off-piste runs not in play, Nacho steered us toward Bonaigua, the third sector, which we hadn’t yet explored. “Wow, it just goes on and on, doesn’t it?” Tim said of the place, as we took yet another chairlift to get there.

Bonaigua, too, has its own character: No snow cannons blow here, and fewer people make the trek to reach its slopes. The other areas can feel like an amusement park, Nacho said. Bonaigua feels more natural. “For me,” he said, “this is the best place.”

For Tim and me, Bonaigua felt like one of the better ski areas in the American West. Pines flecked the ridge tops. Tight gullies opened onto steep aprons of snow in a geographical arrangement that was reminiscent of Alta or Snowbird or Jackson Hole. “All these — how do you say, couloirs? — you are able to ski,” said Nacho, shaking his head at the possibilities. We shook our heads, too, at our missed opportunity. “Can you imagine this with a foot of fresh snow?” Tim said. We’re both pretty jaded skiers, but we agreed we wanted to come back with better timing.

For now we blasted around on Bonaigua’s groomers, chasing Nacho, all alone. Where was everybody? we asked. Nacho chuckled. When the Spaniards come to Baqueira/Beret, he said, they drive their Porsche Cayennes, they dress well, they ski from bar to bar. “They do everything but ski,” he said. “Skiing is a great excuse” for the lifestyle.

Eventually, we, too, began to feel the seductive pull of that Mediterranean rhythm, minus the Porsche. Each day we woke later. We skied less aggressively, and pulled up at the slopeside restaurants more frequently for cortados, and took lunches where we lingered a little longer, and napped a little later. Each day we had multicourse dinners that stretched deeper into the night.

On our last afternoon we skied up to a cabin on the slopes in Beret. It was a new Champagne bar. The menu had $10 flutes of Moët & Chandon and $150 caviar from the valley. A D.J. began to play on the sunny deck.

Usually the ski bum in me hated this kind of thing. My watch was urgent: There never was much time left to ski. Now I ignored it. I plopped into a deck chair facing the sun, shut my eyes and considered a flute of bubbly.

It didn’t seem disorienting. It seemed right.

IF YOU GO

Some of the most convenient lodgings are in the slopeside village of Baqueira. The Hotel Val de Ruda (34-973-645-811; hotelvalderudabaqueira.com) has 35 small but tasteful rooms, an extensive menu of spa treatments, and lockers at the slopes, which are just a five-minute walk away. Double rooms start at 167 euros (about $208 at $1.25 to the euro), with a great breakfast. The Val de Neu (34-973-635-000; hotelbaqueiravaldeneu.com) is one of a few new five-star hotels that have been built next to the slopes in the last several years. It is large, with clean lines and a ski lift 50 yards from its door. Doubles from 325 euros, including breakfast.

In the village of Arties sits the stone-and-wood Parador de Arties (34-73-640-801; parador.es), an elegant hotel (part of the government-run parador system) that’s built in part from a 16th-century fortified tower and chapel. Double rooms begin at around 80 euros a person.

For help with bookings, call the general lodgings office (34-902-415-415), which books much of the valley.

RESTAURANTS AND APRèS-SKI

For après-ski, head to Arties and TauèrnesUrtau (Plaça Urtau, 12; 34-973-640-926; urtau.com; closed Mondays) to graze from a mind-boggling spread of tapas and pinchos (from 1.40 euros).

Or head down into Vielha where a dozen more tapas places await, like the often-busy Bar Era Plaça (Plaça Dera Gleisa; 34-973-640-249). An assortment of tapas for two, with a bottle of house wine, costs about 20 euros.

For dinner, don’t miss Casa Irene (Calle Mayor, 3 Arties; 34-973-644-364; hotelcasairene.com), where the menu is shaped by the region’s history. Entrees are 19.50 to 33 euros, with a five-course gastronomic menu, with wine, for 58.50 euros. Reservations at this and all the restaurants are recommended.

In the hamlet of Gessa, just down the road from Baqueira, is Casa Rufus (Calle San Jaime, 8-10; 34-973-645-246; vallearan.com/rufus; closed Sundays), which serves gussied-up valley cuisine like trout; steak with foie gras; venison; and rabbit. Most entrees are 30 to 35 euros.

Casa Maria Ademá (Calle Santa Eulália, 3; 34-973-644-169), in the village of Unha, is literally a mom-and-pop place, an 1828 home where Señora Ademá prepares hearty Aranese meals. It’s the same menu every night: olha Aranesa, lamb chops and steak. Open nightly. A four-course meal, with wine, is 17 euros.

IN THE VAL D’ARAN

Baqueira/Beret (34-973-639-010; for snow conditions, 34-973-639-025; baqueira.es) is generally open from mid-November until mid-April. An adult, single-day lift ticket costs 46 euros. Locals say that late January is usually one of the best times to come here; the Christmas crowds are gone, hotel rates are in “low season” and the snow is (usually) plentiful. For assured snow, some prefer March.

CHRISTOPHER SOLOMON, who lives in Seattle, writes frequently about skiing and the outdoors.